Behind the scenes
How our projects were really built: the decisions we made, what we tried first, and the people the software is for.
Tziyun B'Rega
See how Tziyun B'Rega works
"Why can't you just scan it?" How Tziyun B'Rega beganIt started with one email asking a simple question. The studio's account of the first search, a lottery-ticket comparison, a childhood memory of bubbles, and why we built our own reader.
How we chose the tools: Tauri, Electron, then Wails and GoWe started with Rust and Tauri, went back to the tools we knew, and ended up with Go and Wails, which we never planned. The lesson: pick tools you can deliver with.
Why we left Electron: the exam that moved on the pageTziyun B'Rega printed exams through a hidden Chrome window, and later pages drifted. We tried LaTeX twice, then found Folio, Go and Wails. The project history shows the path.
Printing without the print dialog: learning from how Chrome does itThe first idea was to hand printing to the operating system and let people sort out the options. That was a mistake. Here is how we cut the choices down to three, and how reading Chromium's source helped.
Finding the scanner, and taking over its settingsA teacher should press one button and get a scan. Behind that button are a search for the scanner, a list of settings nobody should have to touch, and a Windows firewall surprise.
Building Windows software from a Mac: a borrowed computer, a virtual machine and a photo of an errorSchools run Windows. We work on a Mac and Ubuntu. This is how Tziyun B'Rega learned to build and test for Windows, and the photo that taught us the most.
A mouse pointer that looked wrong on WindowsThe same program can look different on every operating system. One day the mouse pointer changed on Windows, so we chose our own pointer and learned to test the small things.
Watching a school computer from far away: what the logs taught us about small computersTziyun B'Rega sends its logs home so we can see it work where we cannot visit. A small computer in a remote town showed us that a computer's size, and in the end its processor, decides how well the program runs.
Offline first, but is it really always offline?Tziyun B'Rega works without an internet connection, but a few features need one. Telling the two cases apart turned out to be harder than we expected.Shapi-Lumda
See how Shapi-Lumda works
From video calls to a course you can do on your ownWe started teaching our first student on video calls. The format did not fit, so we built something you read, try, check and move on from, at your own pace.
Checking the answer on the student's own deviceWhen you press the button, your browser checks your code in its own isolated space. We saw it could be done, built our own test engine, and rebuilt it when we found it marked right answers wrong.
Writing 306 lessons for Hebrew and English readersThe first JavaScript lessons were too close to the course that gave us the idea, so we threw them away and wrote our own, in Hebrew and English, with examples from everyday life.
A text box that feels like a real code editorA student types code into a plain box. We made it a small code editor, so that Visual Studio Code or any other editor is not new when they get there.BotKB.com
We were not happy with the first designThis site started with ideas from Gemini and Claude, and a lot of movement. We were not happy with it. Here is what we built first and what we threw away.
One picture changed the whole siteWe brought one picture, and the colors, the mood and the words of every page followed it. A story about taste, and about letting an assistant do the matching.
A calm site that is also lightWe wanted this site to feel rich without feeling heavy. Here is how we kept the motion gentle and the pages light, and what a page checker said when we ran it on 28 October.
Hebrew and English as equalsEvery page of this site exists in English and in Hebrew, read left to right and right to left. Here is what that meant for the fonts, the layout, the error page and the way we check our words.
We fact-checked our own case studiesBefore our case studies went live, we checked every claim against the real code and the live sites. Some of our first wording was wrong. Here is what changed.
What we did and what the assistant didA plain list of who did what in building this site: the taste, the pictures and the corrections on our side, the building, the matching and the checking on the assistant's.
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